The emergence of Grids enables the sharing of a wide range of resources for solving large-scale computational and data intensive problems in science, engineering and business. While much has been done to build Grid middleware on top of existing operating systems, little has been done to extend the underlying operating systems for enabling and facilitating Grid computing, for example by embedding important functionalities directly into the operating system. XtreemOS project aims at investigating and proposing new services that should be added to current operating systems to build a Grid infrastructure in a simple way. This approach can be seen to have some advantages over conventional Grid middleware.
Therefore, the goals of XtreemOS project are to design, implement, evaluate and distribute an open source Grid operating system which supports Grid applications, and capable of running on a wide range of underlying platforms, from clusters to mobiles. Installed on each participating machine (PC, cluster of workstations, mobile device), the XtreemOS system will provide for the Grid what a traditional operating system offers for a single computer: abstraction from the hardware and secure resource sharing between different users. The approach being investigated is to base XtreemOS on the existing well-accepted open source Linux OS. The underlying Linux OS will be extended as needed to support virtual organisations spanning across many machines and to provide appropriate interfaces to Grid OS services. A set of system services will provide users with all the Grid capabilities associated with current Grid middleware, but fully integrated into the OS. By integrating Grid capabilities into the Linux operating system, XtreemOS will also provide a more robust, secure and easier way to manage a Grid infrastructure for system administrators.